The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman (review)

“Then too, when the castrato first came into being, the human body in Europe was still a relatively open site, permeable and reproducible” (p. 208). So writes Martha Feldman in The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Although this statement refers to the Enlightenment-era decline of the castrato in popularity, it could also be mapped onto Feldman’s book itself. In this thoughtful, thorough exploration, the figure of the castrato becomes a “relatively open site,” “permeable” to Feldman’s larger inquiries, which include definitions of social masculinity and the emergence of sexual binaries as associated with the singing voice, the cultural impact of shifting systems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patronage, vocal production and anatomy, virtuosity and sensibility, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance practice.

This book can easily be situated within current discourse on castrati, patronage, seventeenth-century masculinity, and performance practice. Recent comprehensive studies on the figure of the castrato have given much-needed attention to individual castrati, following in the recent musicological trend of singer-oriented versus work-oriented approaches. (These studies include: Patricia Howard, The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014]; Helen Berry, The Castrato and His Wife [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]; Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009]; and Nicholas Clapton, Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato [London: Haus Books, 2008].) In contrast, Feldman provides a new approach by putting the lives of many castrati in dialogue with a complex web of cultural-historical anthropology.

She emphasizes that her goal is not to merely offer an “explanation of the phenomenon” of the castrato from 1550 to 1922. Rather, the hybridity of the castrato is, in Feldman’s deft hands, the means by which readers can better understand unresolved questions around social, economic, and cultural practices of Western classical vocal production (p. xvi). The castrato’s hybrid status results from his ability to take advantage of both hybridized socioeconomic systems (“a gift economy governed by patron-client relations and an emergent bourgeois economy based in mercantilism and cash exchange,” p. xvi) and still-flexible eighteenth-century concepts of gender. The book is divided into three parts: “Reproduction,” “Voice,” and “Half-Light.” Three major themes revolving around this concept of hybridity run through the six chapters of the book: reproduction, economics, and representation. Although musical figures and images are interspersed within individual chapters, additional, more substantial collections of images appear at the end of each part.

Chapters 1 and 2 (“Of Strange Births and Comic Kin” and “The Man Who Pretended to Be Who He Was: A Tale of Reproduction”) explore the castrato’s attempts to participate in various forms of “male social reproduction” (p. xvii). The strictures of primogeniture in early-modern Italy provided the perfect climate for a proliferation of castrations: “the castrato’s nonprocreative status [had] a distinctive place within critical boundaries of patriarchy” (p. 45). The castrato was thus a sacrificial victim of reproduction who, nonetheless, produced economic advantages for his family. Castrati, despite their inability to sexually reproduce, were politically masculine, and Feldman asks how “being a man and being a castrato converged on the hard ground of lived life” (p. 43). Arguing that the presence of satirical and comedic accounts of castrati prove that the maleness of the castrato was indeed historically accepted as tenable, Feldman explores the various ways in which castrati participated in reproduction. Congruent with the book’s economy-oriented theme of evolving systems of patronage, many castrati participated in reproduction as pedagogues, with “teachers or institutions as the first in a series of surrogate fathers” (p. 60). In addition, familial and thus natal bonds were often extended horizontally, with brothers or sisters traveling or performing with the castrato, as in the case of Guadagni, Berenstadt, Vismarri...